music history

Ray Manzarek died this past Monday in Germany, where he was being treated for bile-duct cancer.
I wasn’t into too many popular bands of the 1960s, but I was a fan of The Doors.  They were a quintessential LA band.  The founding members, Ray and Jim Morrison, met on the beach in Venice.  Their song lyrics contained references to Los Angeles.  The band got their …

The late Sun Ra said his jazz came from outer space, with albums like Visits Planet Earth, We Travel the Space Ways, and the classic ESP disk The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra, with him on the cover, a cosmological sphere depicting him next to Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, and Galileo. I interviewed Sun Ra back in the 1980s and he told me about …

Shamshad Begum, playback singer on many early Bollywood films, has died at the ripe old age of 94.  Too bad we’ve never heard of her.
We do know about sisters Lata Mangeshkar and Asha Bhosle.  They hold the Guiness World Record for most recorded singers:  younger sister Asha has done 12,000 songs, older sister Lata has done over 25,000.  They hold Bollywood playback singer hegemony.
No …

RCA Living Stereo, along with Mercury Living Presence and the Decca classical catalogue, have been and will always be some of the best vinyl ever produced.  Vinyl is special: you never quite hear the sizzle of the drum cymbals and other frequencies the same way on most digital, especially the horrendous sound of early digital, which Neil Young once compared to nails being driven …

Hungarian cellist Janos Starker has died.  He was 88. Born in Budapest July 5, 1924, he was a child prodigy, giving his first concert at six. At just 14, he was asked to step in, on three hours notice, to perform the Dvorak Cello Concerto, one of the most difficult works in the cello repertoire.  He succeeded with aplomb.  Later in 1945, when he …

Argentinian composer Gustavo Santaollala is best known for his soundtracks (Brokeback Mountain, Babel, Motorcycle Diaries), but his side project, Bajofondo Tango Club, now called just Bajofondo goes back to before he became a big soundtrack composer.   I first heard his music with on Ronroco, on which he plays solo charango, the Argentine folkloric instrument made from an armadillo shell.  It is a gorgeous album, …

A friend sent me this video of a 1971 concert of Fela with Cream drummer Ginger Baker.  It was most likely lifted from a great documentary, Ginger Baker in Africa, a must-see for any Fela fan.   The show overflows with dionysian energy, an African counterpart to love-in shows of the countercultural 1960s.  For anybody in LA considering going to the Ahmanson Theater to …

I’ve never been a fan of Iggy Pop (b. James Newell Osterberg, Muskegon, Michigan, April 21, 1947), though like most 66 year olds I feel envy and awe at his utter lack of body fat:  he’s all muscle and sinew (is he a gym rat in secret?)  I did feature his song “I Wanna Be Your Dog” from his very first album with the …

One of the first modern genocides began on this day in 1915, when Ottoman Turks systematically killed one and a half million minority Armenians.   Far more is known and has been written about the Nazi genocide of Jews than what happened here during World War I (I would include Cambodia’s two million citizens murdered during Pol Pot’s regime as well….less is known there, …

I heard today on the news that the new Pope Francis may nominate Father Antonio for beatification.  Archbishop Oscar Romero (in his song Ruben Blades took creative license and named him Antonio, but it’s the same person)  was top prelate in the war-torn El Salvador in the late 1970s and early 80s.   He practiced Liberation Theology, which the contras and government thugs didn’t …